Wind Rose

Wind Rose

Curatorial consultancy: Iris Mendel

24.02.2017 - 02.02.2017

On Thursday February 2, 2017, Alfred – A Cooperative Institute for Arts and Culture, will open a group exhibition titled ‘Wind Rose’, which will feature the works of Michal Geva (New York/ Israel), Georg Frauenschuh and Gerlind Zeilner (Austria) and Talya Raz, with the curatorial consultancy and text by Iris Mendel.

As the number of the main directions of the wind rose, the exhibition brings together four artists from different locations: Michal Geva who resides in New York, Georg Frauenschuh and Gerlind Zeilner from Vienna, and Talya Raz from Tel Aviv. The exhibition space brings the works together, and in parallel points out their geographical gap.

This painting exhibition seeks to capture the reality of being dismantled and chaotic. Chaos and disruption control the revealed images as if a violent storm had passed through the different painting sites and has left its mark. Loss of perspective and exchanges between the heavens and the earth, interior and exterior spaces, nature and architecture, mingle with each other like a dreadful nightmare. The language of painting is also swift. Large smears of paint, patches of color as if carelessly placed next to each other, deletions, or color drips, in addition to soft and sensitive pencil drawings.

Is this a statement about insecurity and discontent in contemporary reality? An attempt to reflect the fear of an impending catastrophe? Reality is reduced to various moments in the painting, snapshots of different viewpoints which connect the personal and private with broad and global experiences.

Michal Geva, born 1980, lives in New York, graduated from the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts, New York (2016), studied at the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2003), BFA graduate of the Midrasha, Beit Berl (2008). Took part in the program for young artists at Alma College (2011-13).

Geva has shown her work in numerous group and solo exhibitions and art fairs in Israel and in New York. Won the America-Israel Foundation scholarship (2008) and received a grant from the Rabinovitch Foundation (2013).

Geva uses images of architecture in landscape, and is interested in the distortion and interruption that occurs during the process of painting, while referring to social, political and emotional structures.

Georg Frauenschuh, born 1979, lives in Vienna, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (2004), teaches drawing at the Art University in Linz, Austria. Frauenschuh exhibited solo exhibitions in Austria and participated in group exhibitions and artist residencies in Austria, Albania, Bulgaria, Germany, China and more.

His works refer to the deterioration of the contemporary visual language. Frauenschuh transforms our contemporary detritus of online imagery into expanded representations of human fallibility.

Gerlind Zeilner, born 1971, lives in Vienna, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (1998), has exhibited around the world and has given guest lectures in Austria and abroad. She has won many awards and participated in artist residencies in China, Hong Kong, United States, Albania, Turkey and Syria.

Her works, in drawing, painting and collage are generated with bold spontaneity, and are based on accumulative studies of collective memory, drawing on both contemporary and historic popular narratives. Zeilner creates imaginary worlds that transcend the everyday.

Talya Raz, born 1975, lives in Tel Aviv, and is a Co-Manager in Alfred Gallery. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Haifa University (2007) and has a B.A in Fine Arts and Psychology from Haifa University (2003), attended the Free Academy in The Hague, Netherlands. Raz has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Israel, Germany and the Netherlands, and has recently participated in an artist residency in Austria.

Raz's paintings create a childlike world with dream-like qualities, vacillating between hallucinations and nightmares, all based on reality.

The figures of the children, central to the works, are usually detached: daydreaming, asleep and even dead.

The Austrian Federal ministry of culture and the Austrian Cultural Forum, Tel Aviv, funded the arrival and stay of Georg Frauenschuh and Gerlind Zeilner